Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women by Geraldine Brooks Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women
Book Review: Really Improved My Opinion of Ayatollah Khomeni and Iran
Summary: 5 Stars
I'm an American woman who has lived overseas in Morocco for twelve years. My friends and I are reading this book for our monthly bookclub selection. None of us was able to put the book down, once we started it. We all read the book in one or two days.The author is a journalist who spent considerable time in the Middle East, reporting from various countries. Although this is not a scholarly work, it is well-researched. The book focuses on her own personal experiences in each country, and ancecdotes from various women she met in each country.
For me, the most interesting parts of the book discussed the home and personal life of the Ayatollah Khomeni. After reading this book, my opinion of both him, and of Islamic life in Iran, went up by about 300 percent. The author met and interviewed his wife, and various family members. He was a fairly modern, new-age husband, and playful father, who even got up in the middle of the night and gave his kids their bottles, and changed their diapers. The only thing he was quite strict about was the Islamic religion.
Anyone who is interested in the lives of women in the Middle East should read this book. The book is as accurate today as it was when it was written.
Book Review: Why Saudi Arabia?
Summary: 5 Stars
Other reviewers have lamented that Brooks focused on the Middle East in general and on Saudi Arabia in particular to the detriment of providing insight into Muslim societies outside of the Arab world. Perhaps a quote from the book explains why Brooks made this deliberate choice:"...Saudi Arabia is the extreme. Why dwell on the extreme, when it would be just as easy to write about a Muslim country such as Turkey, led by a woman, where one in six judges is a woman, and one in thirty private companies has a woman manager?
I think it is important to look in detail at Saudi Arabia's grim reality because this is the kind of sterile, segregated world that Hamas in Israel, most mujahedin factions in Afghanistan, many radicals in Egypt and the Islamic Salvation Front Algeria are calling for, right now, for their countries and for the entire Islamic world. None of these groups is saying, "Let's recreate Turkey, and separate church and state." Instead, what they want is Saudi-style, theocratically enforced repression of women, cloaked in vapid cliches about a woman's place being the paradise of her home..."
Brook's book was published in 1995. Nine years later, her assessment of Saudi Arabia's corrosive influence beyond its borders is still valid. Today, Wahabbi extremism, funded by Saudi backers, has spread out even further into the Philippines, Chechnya, Western Europe and the US in its most virulent and deadly form, terrorism. 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta's last written words requesting that no woman attend to his dead body betrays a poisoned philosophy that hates life as much as it hates women.
Yes, Brooks expresses her opinion in every chapter. She is no more objective about religiously inspired misogyny than one can be about Nazis. To expect a completely neutral essay about either topic denies an understanding of the subject's inherent evil.
Book Review: Looking for a thought-provoking read? No? Ok, then read this
Summary: 1 Stars
This book reads like a novel because that's basically what it is. Brooks tries her best to be a scholar, but she simply can't overcome her journalistic tendencies. So the book ends up being really great for someone who kinda sorta wants to know about women in Islam but doesn't want to think about it any deeper than a surface level. Brooks plays up the negative and down plays the positive. Here is a synopsis of her argument: countries in the "Islamic world" are oppressive to women and inhumane! Freedom is restricted, human rights are constantly violated and life is basically a dismal affair for women. Oppressed, oppressed, beat up and knocked around, forced to wear layer upon layer of clothing in very hot desert climate, female circumcision (which is perpatuated by women themselves), the presentation of gross generalizations as fact, etc etc. These countries are backwards and the "West" is definitely better off, modern, full of equality and justice, the feminist movement, etc etc. (Oh yeah and by the way, where as the United States has never had a female present, in 1994 women led 3 Islamic countries. But let's forget that because I want to tell you about more atrocities. And nevermind the positive spin I COULD have put on things, because I have an agenda to push)
Brooks is a journalist, not a scholar. The content is to be expected.
If you want to read a good book about Muslim women, read something by Lila Abu-Lughod. She's an anthropologist.
As a side note, reviewers shouldn't use the term "cultural relativism" unless they understand its meaning. And the ideas and intentions behind its use... You can be culturally relative and still believe that certain cultural practices are inherently wrong. No one is unbiased anyway. The point is to be aware of them. It's something Brooks often chose not to do, which is what makes her book such a shoddy rag.
Book Review: This book made me cry
Summary: 5 Stars
I read this book at the suggestion of my sister, and after the attack on the United States by fundamentalist Muslim terrorists (the book was written several years before the destruction of the World Trade Center). I agree with other reviewers that Geraldine Brooks' insightful, thoughtful, provocative book functions as more of a condemnation of the interpretation of Islam by a loud minority of men who are apparently so deeply insecure of their intellect and masculinity that they must legislate and reduce the role of women in society to invisibility than as a condemnation of the religion itself.Readers will gain great insight into the current dilemma of women in Iraq, who are finding that they had MORE rights under the brutal regime of Saddam Hussein than under the Sharia law of fundamentalist clerics. What I find especially provocative is that the tenants of Islam are applied unequally to men and women: men seem to have some leeway in adapting to modern times and customs, whereas women have had their freedoms truncated from those available to them in the seventh century.
Anyone interested in the history of the Middle East and how human rights abuses hide under "cultural sensitivity" should read this book.
Book Review: Informative, but very biased.
Summary: 2 Stars
I have major problems with this book. The author obviously went in with the pinion that women were being mistreated in the Islamic world, a perception she "supports" with various unrelated examples. The book is obviously biased toward the author's western viewpoint of the status of women, and she applies her cultural standards to other cultures--something no self-respecting anthropologist (or journalist, in her case) should do.I will say one thing in the book's defense, and it is that through it all, she tries to remind readers that what goes on is some countries is in direct opposition to the example set by the prophet Muhammad. She makes an effort to separate what Islam requires/suggests regarding women, and what certain countries and people do to women in the name of Islam, and for that I thank her. Beyond that, I think this book is the story of an author who went out looking for information to support a theory she had already formed. So much for unbiased journalism.